Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith recently kicked off a podcast series with Music Radar, and none other than Alex Lifeson of Rush was the inaugural guest.

When the talk turned to guitars, Lifeson gushed about his signature Gibson Les Paul Axcess, saying that as a kid, he “dreamed of having a Gibson.”

“I had a cheap Kent – you know, a Japanese guitar – and then a Kanora, a Japanese guitar,” he said. “I borrowed a friend's Harmony for years. To have a Gibson was really, really my dream as a kid.

“So, all these years later – all these decades later – to have a signature model with my name on it, that's part of the Gibson family, that's really a cool thing. I'm very proud of that.”

He added, “And we didn't just stick my name on a guitar that could sell a bunch; we spent a lot of time. We spent a couple of years developing something that really worked for me. We went through a lot of body weights, different types of wood. The chambering on this particular guitar is one of the reasons why it's a lightweight version of a Les Paul…”